Imagine a Union …

Imagine as a business fantasy that you are a business owner and that you were able to create a union, unbeknownst to anyone not in the know. You “allow” your people to join the union, even encourage it. The union is supported by dues that the business owner gracefully allows to be deducted from weekly paychecks. The union agrees to a comprehensive contract that actually favors the business owner in subtle ways, making him even more rich. The owner eventually supports “closed shop” status, meaning that you have to be a member of the union to work in his business. “It is the right thing to do,” you say.

The union members are urged to “organize” other businesses as well as support the efforts of their union to support political candidates that support the union and the business.

Union leaders are indoctrinated into the workings of the union without knowledge of who is pulling the strings behind the scenes. The union is a wealth and power generating machine for its sponsor, but is sold as an instrument of the workers to avoid oppression by their paymasters.

Now, take the word “union” in every instance above and change it into the word “religion.” Maybe also change the word “dues” to the word “tithes.”

That about sums it up.

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Randi Weingarten: The Right-Wing Assault on Unions Won’t Win: It Just Makes Us Angrier

We are in a race for the soul of our country. But if we really double down, if we fight not only for what’s right but for what the vast majority of Americans believe, working people—not Janus’ wealthy funders—will emerge as the real winners. Randi Weingarten

Lovely comment by Randi (Randi is the President of the American Federation of Teachers, my old union), but apparently she hasn’t been watching. The union movement has been taking it on the chin for the last 40 years and it has only gotten worse. If the recent offenses are what it takes to get the union movement to wake up, well, “better late than never” comes to mind.

I am fearful that the response will be too little, too late. It is already significantly too late. This feeling of mine seems to be partly due to the current composition of U.S. labor unions. So, who are these union members, now? They are teachers, nurses, “service workers,” and so on. In the hey day of labor unions, the people in unions were iron workers, construction workers, garment workers, auto workers, many, many men and women who worked with their hands. They needed those hands to support their unions because their oppressors brought clubs, knives, even guns to union rallies. There was literally blood in the streets.

The gains made by unions were made by sheer insistence, yes with a threat of violence, but typically in response to violence. A lot of luck was involved. World War 2 happened with Franklin Roosevelt in office was the biggest stroke of luck. (Roosevelt was called “a traitor to his class” for his pro union efforts and high taxes. His “class,” of course, was the “wealthy.”)

From my youth I remember picket lines, strike funds, strike kitchens and food sharing, shoving matches, dirty tricks, and this was well after the major battles had been fought (which were pre-1960). I had colleagues I was trying to recruit into our teacher’s union who told me they could not because they remembered their father coming home from Detroit union meetings bloodied as if from war. There was indeed some memory of what had been fought over and for.

I was anti-union myself until I experienced a work-related problem I couldn’t solve alone and I received unsolicited help from a union member, who was a colleague, not a “union thug.” I decided that something was wrong there, so I read several books on union history and I was stunned at what the union movement was about. The rapacious greed of the “industrialist” class. The disdain they had for working people. The tactics employed by the people in power (got a strike, have your friends in government mobilize the National Guard to protect your company and brutalize the strikers, or if you didn’t have friends in government hire “strikebreakers” who did just what their name implies).

I also found out that every time a state’s unions urged that labor history be taught in high school, an immense backlash from the rich and powerful occurs. They know that if people knew the real story, unions would be perceived very sympathetically. Instead there has been an unrelenting anti-union propaganda campaign resulting in ordinary American workers being quite anti-union. And we in the union movement have allowed this to happen.

It will be a long slog to get anywhere near back to where we were. And I wonder if people who don’t get dirty from their work are up to the task.

 

 

Why Labor History Is Not in Our Schools

I remember a years long battle to get labor history included in high school curricula. It failed miserably. It continues to fail miserably, not because that history isn’t relevant to today’s world, but because it is.

Allow me to share some quotes from an article in Appalachian Magazine:

In 1921, black, white and immigrant mineworkers took up arms to battle the coal companies that controlled and exploited every aspect of their lives. United, they wore red bandannas to identify each other in battle. They called themselves the “Redneck Army”.

The West Virginia mine wars were the bloodiest labor conflict in American history. Culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, more than 10,000 miners marched from the Kanawha valley toward Mingo to join other striking miners in protest. In their way stood the Logan county sheriff, Don Chafin, who was in the pocket of big coal – a $32,000 payoff each year, roughly $400,000 in today’s dollars.

Chafin commanded a private army of more than 2,000 mercenaries and multiple airplanes equipped to drop bombs on workers. Siding with Chafin and the coal bosses, President Warren G Harding sent federal troops too, armed with gas and more planes (the fourth time that troops had been called in to squash organized miners in the mountain state).

The miners proved what we know today: there is nothing more frightening to a coal boss or corrupt politician than a courageous, united, multi-ethnic coalition of working men and women.

In the coal camps, black people found segregated housing and schools, and lower pay. Operators preferred to break strikes by importing black workers, to sow discord among the races. But by the 1910s, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was fighting for pay equality, and requiring an oath from every member not to discriminate against any fellow member by “creed, or color, or nationality”.

Its first paid organizer in West Virginia was a black man. Miners swore an oath to each other, across “class or creed”. An early planning committee consisted of three officers: one white person born in West Virginia, one Italian immigrant and one black person.

One miner remarked: “I call it a darn solid mass of different colors and tribes, blended together, woven together, bound, interlocked, tongued and grooved together in one body.”

Do you see why “certain people” will not allow our youths to learn about the labor history of the last century? And as was not said at the end of LooneyTunes cartoons “And That’s Not All, Folks!”

Teachers Unions? Bah, Who Needs Them?

Six years ago, the state of Wisconsin passed the highly controversial 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, which virtually eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public-sector workers, as well as slashed those workers’ benefits, among other changes.

As Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) argued, “We no longer have seniority or tenure. That means we can hire and fire based on merit, we can pay based on performance. That means we can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms and we can pay them to be there.”

Well, did they?

What do you think will happen to an employer who slashes wages and benefits? People will leave their employ. Who leaves first? The people who have the most confidence they can find another job, that is the best workers. Who stays. The sluggards, the unimaginative, the fearful … not all, of course, but a higher concentration of these stay. (Studies have shown this to be the case.)

Action Reaction
An analysis of the effect of Act 10 has found:

• In the year immediately following the law’s passage, median compensation for Wisconsin teachers decreased by 8.2 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, with median benefits being cut by 18.6 percent and the median salary falling by 2.6 percent. Median salaries and benefits continued to fall during the next four years so that median compensation in the 2015-16 school year was 12.6 percent—or $10,843 dollars—lower than it was before the passage of Act 10.

• The percentage of teachers who left the profession spiked to 10.5 percent after the 2010-11 school year, up from 6.4 percent in the year before Act 10 was implemented. Exit rates have remained higher than before, with 8.8 percent of teachers leaving after the 2015-16 school year— the most recent school year for which data are available.
• The percentage of teachers with less than five years of experience increased from 19.6 percent in the 2010-11 school year to 24.1 percent in the 2015-16 school year.
• Average teaching experience decreased from 14.6 years in the 2010-11 school year to 13.9 in the 2011-12 school year, which is where it remained in the 2015-16 school year.
• Interdistrict moves—when a teacher leaves one Wisconsin district to teach at another the next school year—has increased from 1.3 percent before the passage of Act 10 to 3.4 percent at the end of the 2014-15 school year.

Are you surprised?

The False Narrative
The core of the false narrative is in plain sight; it is “That means we can hire and fire based on merit, we can pay based on performance.” This is a business model. The problem is that in a business, the “boss” owns the company (or the boss’s boss or the …). The owner has the right to hire and fire inherent in his ownership. In a public school, the “owner” is the public, the taxpayers of the school district. There is no mechanism by which those owners can fire anyone (by state law). Prior to Act 10, the “owner” of each school district elected a school board which carried out negotiations with the employees to determine wages and working conditions. In no school district of which I am aware are teachers getting rich. When you think of employees getting rich, you think of doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, high level executives, but teachers … not so much. Having high educational attainment did not result in abnormally high wages for teachers, but there were tradeoffs: instead of higher salaries, better benefits and working conditions were offered and accepted, through negotiation. Act 10 chopped the head off of local control and took it over at the state level. (Republicans in favor of local control? Not so much.)

So, how did the minions of the schools (principals?) do in hiring the best and the brightest? How did they do in paying for performance? How did they do with getting the bums out of the racket? Aren’t these business types always talking about how important good management is? Was there any effort to improve the quality of the people in charge? No? (No.)

As usual, the actual motives for Act 10 was not in the bullshit offered by proponents. The Koch Brothers-fueled politician, Scott Walker, was executing a typical anti-union action for the billionaire class. Unions are the only organization with enough power to resist the oppression of workers by employers, hence they have to go. (Plus they tend to vote Democrat.)

But actions have reactions. Too bad Scott Walker doesn’t feel any of the reaction … just the teachers and the students and the “owners” of the school district. The Koch Brothers, in reaction, kept pouring money into Scott Walker’s presidential candidacy and into his gubernatorial re-election campaign coffers. If you want quality workers, you gotta pay them!

Conservative A-hole Tanks Own Company Because Union

According to the California Today column in today’s NY Times:

“… popular news sites went dark on Thursday after its parent company DNAinfo shut down the entire Gothamist network of city-centric websites.
“The move came a week after reporters and editors at the New York newsrooms of Gothamist and DNAinfo voted to join a union.
“On Thursday, visitors to the websites were greeted by a post from Joe Ricketts, the company’s billionaire owner and founder of TD Ameritrade. He praised journalists who ‘reported tens of thousands of stories that have informed, impacted, and inspired millions of people.’
“But he added, ‘DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure.’“Mr. Ricketts, who started DNAinfo in 2009 and bought Gothamist last spring, had been outspoken in his dislike of unions.“As the company’s New York employees moved to unionize last spring, management warned that DNAinfo had been losing money for years. Mr. Ricketts later wrote, ‘I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.’”

Conservatives have poisoned their own minds about unions so much that this, er, gentlemen, couldn’t see a major opportunity right in front of himself.

If it were true that the company had been losing money for years (one has to ask why one expands a company by buying another one when one is losing money, but we understand one has to spend money to make money), but I digress, if the company has been losing money for years, open the books to your new union and ask them to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Closing the company is still an option, in fact it is a big hammer to use if conventional negotiations were to occur. (I’d rather avoid conventional negotiations and instead prefer interest-based negotiations, but one doesn’t always control how things will go.)

Possibly, if the company were losing money, the union could be a source of ideas as to how to reverse that trend. Certainly it would damper a unions lust after better wages and working conditions for its members.

Companies of European origin who set up shop in the U.S. actively encourage the formation of unions as being effective partners in the running of a profitable company. European countries include union officers on their boards of governors, often by law as well as custom. Of course, in the U.S. they run into conservative state and federal government representatives who put the kibosh on such efforts when they occur. We can’t have examples of working, cooperative unions to be able to point to now, can we?

We would like to know whether Mr. Ricketts has ever been a member of a union, or worked in a union environment, or managed a union-based company. I suspect not. I assume he got his information from other rich assholes like himself, who have no idea what they are talking about and would rather put out their eyes than see what is right in front of them.

In this case the creator of the “corrosive us-against-them dynamic” is certainly not the newly created labor union, it never had a chance to act one way or the other. Gosh, I wonder then, what the source of that “corrosive dynamic” was? Hmm.

A Vision of Rational Decision Making Denied

In a comment on another site, I stated that I had an overarching goal for my teaching “career,” which was the promotion of rational decision making and that I retired from that profession a defeated man. In my last post I commented that “Currently scientists are seeing that we tend to think better in groups, that no individual has all of the puzzle pieces but in communication with others, clusters of puzzle pieces get formed, and then clusters combine to make larger clusters.” We are social animals; we work better in groups. Now we find that we even think better in groups.

My work on rational decision making lead me to this same conclusion. You see, we invested in “interest-based decision making.” This came about as an investigation of less confrontational collective bargaining processes, but we realized it applied to all collective decisions.

I will not bore you with regard to the details of this process but I will point out two of the keystones. The first is that at the beginning of every decision-making process was a complete investigation of “the problem.” Before a problem could be addressed, everyone needed to know what it was and understand it, so this took up much of the “decision-making time.” It also paid immediate benefits. Groups did come together to “address an issue” only to find out that when they tried to clarify it, all involved decided it was not a problem. In one case labor and management came together to solve a problem only to find out that for management, there was no problem, that the problem that labor had to resolve. Management offered support but felt it was not a “stakeholder” in the issue, so should not be making any decisions about it. Labor concurred.

The second keystone was before solutions to identified problems were explored, the “interests” of all of the people involved had to be shared. These were the conditions and reasons that any solution had to satisfy to be viable. Typically, all solutions had to be affordable, had to not break laws, etc. But when exploring the interests of a group, interests like “being seen to be playing fair” arose, as did “fulfilling fiduciary responsibilities,” and “displaying competence.” This part of the process was called “putting the why before the what.” This was especially important for people just “wanting to have a seat at the table,” to be involved. Many people want to be involved, but if the do not have any interests a solution needs to satisfy, they aren’t a stakeholder and do not need to be involved.

This process seems, from the outside, to be cumbersome and it can be but is actually very efficient over time. Over time, the interests of groups become clear and known. People show up to interactions having clarified their idea and have brought any data they think pertinent (usually sharing it ahead of time) as to what problems are so that phase can be addressed rapidly. The big plus is that the solutions that come out of this process are just better. they are more accepted by the decision-making group, who share their acceptance widely and that gets people on board and buying in more rapidly. And better solutions need less tweaking and last longer, a definite bonus. Plus, it was easier to recognize good solutions, because to get that label, an idea had to solve the problem and meet all of the interests of the parties involved.

One example of such a solution is that my last employer, a $150 million a year enterprise, never negotiated salaries with labor. The reason? Each labor segment of the enterprise received a percentage of the income of the business. If revenue went up, everyone got raises. If revenue went down, salaries could go down, but in reality, people were motivated to find cost savings so that did not happen but the process was in place if it had to. As a labor negotiator, I was shocked that labor gave up negotiating salary because that was our “big hammer.” We would always save salaries until last and negotiate working conditions, et. al., first. If we were denied any progress in the early stages, the wage demands would get larger and firmer. This was Negotiating 101. But here I saw management and labor jointly trying to solve problems without the “big hammer” hanging over their heads, because they honestly wanted to be good partners and be part of the solutions, not part of the problems. Go figure.

Contrast this situation with the way we “solve problems” politically. We start with a solution. This is often a proposal or a bill. Then we “score the bill,” that is try to figure out what the costs associated with the “solution” are. Then we assess the political viability of the bill. Will there be enough votes to pass it? Will the President sign it? Is a veto override possible?

At no point is there any effort made in sharing the problem or clarifying it for a wider audience. Instead, some simple homily is offered. Often the titles of the bills are telling, “The American Patriot Act” and “The Affordable Car Act,” or “No Child Left Behind.” And that is it. A great deal of scurrying around to get “support” from this group or that is done, but next a vote is taken (or not).

This is amazingly obfuscatory. Historically, communication was poor, so we assumed that our legislators had our best interests at heart and that they understood what the problem and the solution were and would do the right thing. Right. We quickly saw that political deal making and pandering and profiteering held more sway than some “having our best interests at heart.” But we still go about this in the same fashion even though mass communication is firmly embedded in our society.

Imagine that for any problem that legislation might be offered to solve, there were a period in which the problem had to be clarified and explained clearly and publicly. Plus the interests of all parties involved would have to be stated. If some private group, like the AMA wanted to chime in, it would have to state its interests. If that list did not include some obvious interests we know they held, then it would be clear to one and all that that group had “hidden agendas.” Those issues could then enter the public debate. (Anyone who thinks that the AMA does not have an agenda to protect the employment rights of certified doctors and prevent any doctor not so certified from working, needs to think again. All professional societies have these interests.) Then after these two phases have occurred a work group would be constituted to write the legislation. (We think better together than apart.) We would not have dueling bills, we would have one. That no one party would get all that they desire is probably the norm. That better solutions would be had than just taking the ideas of one or two people and ramming them through, would also be the norm.

Part of the listing of interests, of course, would be a listing of the “campaign contributions” from all parties affected by the legislation to the legislators.

I guess you can see why I feel defeated. I have participated in both processes. One builds relationships, increases job satisfaction amongst decision makers, and creates better solutions that last longer. The other … doesn’t. It is not as if we do not know how.

The New Administration’s Budget

As vague descriptions of the new administration’s 2017-8 federal budget are being circulated, people are shocked, shocked I tell you, that that proposal eviscerates the Environmental Protection Agency and myriad other federal programs that actually help people (Meals on Wheels … gone, Support for Planned Parenthood … gone).

I do not see how anyone could be shocked at these long promised moves. This is the political party that has railed against and taken every opportunity to diminish labor unions, organizations that only exist to protect workers and their rights. It has also railed against Social Security and Medicare, the two most successful programs ever created to avoid poverty, especially in senior citizens.

They have reasons for doing these things, but if you watch carefully, you will see their lips moving, a clear sign they are lying. They are gutting these social programs for one big reason, their paymasters desire it. All of these efforts make working class people more compliant, less likely to strike back, and place as little opposition to what the plutocrats wish to do as possible.

The GOP said it wanted to, it tried to do it before, and now it is doing it. If you are surprised, you are an idiot.

“Let me now … warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party….
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.
It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms,
kindles the animosity of one part against another….”
George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

“In this new era of globalization, the interests of companies and countries have diverged.
In contrast with the past, what is good for America’s global corporations
is no longer necessarily good for the American people.”
Ralph Gomory, Former IBM VP

Wake up people, the corporations own this administration.

The GOP on the Move!

Slow to begin, the GOP legislative onslaught is picking up steam. Here is a partial list of some of their coming hits:

HR 610 Vouchers for Public Education — (The bill also repeals basic nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs.)
HR 899 Terminate the Department of Education
HR 785 National Right to Work (aimed at ending unions, including teacher unions)
HR 861 Terminate the Environmental Protection Agency
HJR 69 Repeal Rule Protecting Wildlife
HR 370 Repeal Affordable Care Act
HR 354 Defund Planned Parenthood
HR 83 Mobilizing Against Sanctuary Cities Bill
HR 147 Criminalizing Abortion (“Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act”)
HR 808 Sanctions against Iran

Actually, I can get behind the HR 899 effort. The Federal Department of Education has been either an embarrassment or a front for the privatization of public education (Arnie Duncan!). So this is no great loss. But what do the other bills have in common? Oh, if the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HR 610 Vouchers for Public Education The rich have been trying for decades to get the private religious school educations they provide their children and currently pay for out of pocket to be paid for by the public. That and they also want to send their kids to lily white schools, preferably one with Country Day School in its name. And even the little touches are precious: with the repeal of the basic nutrition standards for school meals, ketchup is finally a vegetable again.
If the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HR 785 National Right to Work This is famously anti-union legislation. The GOP is financed by corporate employers who wish to suppress worker’s wages. They have been doing a fabulous job of just that for the past 40 years, but still any opposition to their wage suppression scams is not to be countenanced. The plutocrats have pulled the fabulous rhetorical trick of getting their white, working class base to hate unions, the sole power player that can help them against the tyranny of the corporations.
If the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HR 861 Terminate the Environmental Protection Agency Who needs the EPA? Clearly businesses do. When Ronald Reagan called in William Ruckelshaus to tame the EPA’s burgeoning bureaucracy, Mr. Ruckelshaus was astonished to receive encouragement to strengthen the EPA from none other than several chemical industry chief executives. Their message was that “the public, they told me, was spooked about the turmoil at E.P.A. Americans didn’t believe anything was being done to protect their health and the environment. They didn’t believe the E.P.A., and they didn’t believe the chemical industry. These executives had concluded that they needed a confident, fair and independent E.P.A. They knew that an environmental agency trusted by the public to do its job gave their businesses a public license to operate.” But the GOP just can’t help themselves, can they? All of those burdensome regulations hinder the American genius for making money (for plutocrats). Who needs air to breath and water to drink, we need jobs! (Remember the Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs?)
If the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HJR 69 Repeal Rule Protecting Wildlife Hey, they have tooth and claw and don’t they have their own law about those? Let ‘em protect themselves. Under other new GOP legislation they will be allowed to buy firearms with no background checks, just like everybody else.
If the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HR 370 Repeal Affordable Care Act The rich get a tax cut, the poor get early graves, a “win-win” situation for the GOP.
If the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HR 354 Defund Planned Parenthood First they complain that people of color are having too many babies, now they want to make it so they have to have them. Don’t expect any consistency here. This was a campaign promise (not of Donald Trump’s) and a promise is a promise, even if the Planned Parenthood “issue” is another straw dog, like “Acorn.”
If the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HR 83 Mobilizing Against Sanctuary Cities Bill Hey, we said “state’s rights” not “cities’ rights.” Local control? Nope, not while the local control guys are in power.
If the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HR 147 Criminalizing Abortion “Doctors, lock ‘em up!” According to the GOP, those babies must be born before they can be abused and legally executed. It is a matter of the rule of law.
If the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

HR 808 Sanctions against Iran The GOP cannot help itself, it has to “poke the bear.” The Big Bear is Russia but Iran is an ally of Russia, so close enough. The neocons and apocalyptic proselytizers (Steve Bannon, et. all.) want war now because it will only get harder to wipe out those enemies of Christ as time goes on and the MIC says “There are no profits like war profits.”
Oh, and, if the GOP is suggesting it, it favors the rich!

 

Why Conservatives Hate Unions, Part 3451

So, which state in the U.S. has the largest, most thriving economy, right now? Silly question! It is California. Governor Brown has eliminated their massive budget woes, while dealing with a massive drought (a really big problem in an agricultural state), and dealing with the after effects of the Great Recession. Employment is way up. Wages are up. All is good.

One other thing that California leads the country in is … wait for it … union jobs. The number and percentage of union jobs lead the country.

But … but … wait, conservatives have been telling us for years that unions are bad for the country, bad for us, bad, bad, bad … and they still are saying it (the President never fails to mention how bad teacher’s unions are when he addresses education).

Gosh, do you think they might have a hidden agenda?

Golly, I guess I am kinda curious about why they would oppose in a blanket fashion, organizations devoted to helping working people. All unions are bad, they say, there are no good unions and bad unions, all unions are bad, bad, bad.

I wonder what they could possibly have against working people?

May I suggest one answer to that particular question: they dislike the fact that they have to pay workers for their labor. They would be much happier if they did not. And failing the return of outright slavery, their idea of a minimum wage is just that: wages should be the minimum that could possibly be paid. The idea that it be illegal to pay below the minimum wage makes them cry. And the idea of raising the minimum wage makes their head’s explode. Why, why … paying more to laborers would reduce profits and you know how bad that would be!

Really, how bad? Maybe the Walton kids would have one billion less to split. Or the Koch brothers wouldn’t be able to afford all of the Congressmen and senators they wanted to buy. It would be really bad!

And California? Don’t look there, say the Conservatives. They’re all freaks. They even like unions!

I’ve Had All I Can Stands, I Can’t Stands No More!

Leave it to me to quote Popeye the Sailor, maybe I should have used the “I’m mad as Hell, and I won’t take it any more!” line from the movie Network, but Popeye is good, so….

Recently I have been involved in a project involving looking up a great many websites of summer camps. I am amazed at how many summer camps, often free of charge, are available for economically disadvantaged kids, kids with cancer, kids with physical disabilities, kids with mental disabilities, kids who were subjects of abuse, kids who have lost a parent, kids who have survived burns and amputations, etc. Most of these camps have a few paid staff and myriad volunteers.

At the same time my partner has become involved in a leadership institute designed to help young school kids develop leadership skills, skills that will help themselves and their fellow students. In looking around, this city is a hot bed of volunteer organizations.

So, why do people volunteer their time and also gift their money to these organizations? It seems to me these folks, this really huge number of ordinary citizens, are trying to make the world a better place for others, especially for kids.

Contrast that effort, of myriad very busy modern folks devoting their spare time and money in helping others, to the efforts of our current crop of plutocrats (Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Charles and David Koch, etc.) who are spending small portions of their fortunes, which are actually very large quantities of money, in getting the political system to do what they want: basically to allow them to make even more money.

Take Sheldon Adelson: his big issues are the future of the state of Israel, opposition to online gambling, and opposition to unions. Mr. Adelson is in the casino business, so he wants the politicians he bribes, er … supports, to oppose any expansion of online gambling as that would effect his bottom line. And because he is a big business man, he opposes unions (Nevada, the casino state, is a “right to work” state which is a strange euphemism for “unions are illegal state.”) Being against unions is basically opposing ordinary working people’s ability to share in the wealth being created by their labor. Over the last forty years, union membership has declined in the U.S. (but not at all in neighboring Canada; a coincidence, eh?) through various efforts lead by plutocratic money, and as union membership declined, so did middle class wages. Today the average middle class worker makes a bit over $50,000 per year. Forty years ago, the average middle class worker made a bit over $50,000 per year (corrected for inflation). In that same time period, the wealth and income of the business owners nearly doubled.

Mr. Gates has paid for the current “Common Core State Standards” effort as a reform of public schools. That these standards were not written by teachers and parents and students, but were written by people in the “ed biz” (textbook companies, testing companies, charter school management companies) tells you that, no matter Mr. Gates’s motivations, the motivations of the people behind that effort is to “make money off of the public schools.” Since the Great Recession of 2008, funding of public schools has dropped significantly and no one to date has explained how extracting even more money out of the formerly non-profit public schools system to pay for the goods these folks are selling (charter school management services, computer systems, free rent for charter schools, expensive testing systems, curriculum materials, etc.) helps make that system better. If you were to ask any struggling business owner whether they would prefer some real help or help that drains his company of needed resources while doing very little, how do you think he would respond?

On top of all that, you need to know that public schools, even with all of their “handicaps,” are outperforming private schools, charter schools, etc. The common knowledge that “public schools are failing; we all know that” is a big lie, part of a propaganda campaign to get the plutocrat’s profit-taking foot in the door.

The Koch brothers are against corporate welfare, they say so right out of their own mouths. (Good on them, mate.) But they are buying politicians right and left to make sure that no new climate change or environmental legislation gets through Congress or the state houses because the Koch brothers make the bulk of their profits by polluting the air, water, and ground we all share. If those abilities were restricted, then they might only make a few billion dollars a year rather than many billions more.

So, volunteers of the middle class are spending their efforts trying to make their worlds a better place for their friends and neighbors and the plutocrats are spending their time and effort and a great deal of money to make more money.

I’ve had all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!

I will no longer do business with the plutocrats: I will not shop at Wal-Mart, I will not buy products made by the Koch brothers (there are quite a few brands, Goggle a list). I will not vote for candidates who receive money from them or their surrogates. I will not watch any political commercials as I want them to waste their money spreading their lies.

We need to get the money out of our politics. We need to reduce the effect of money in our society. We must oppose the plutocrats at home, in the streets, and in the ballot boxes. If we do not, all of those volunteer efforts will be wasted as the big issues will overwhelm the small. Climate change is a hoax only in this country; have you ever wondered why? Could it be that there is too much money at stake in the richest country in the world to allow it to be real. Do we have to wait until the people of Miami are under eight feet of water to say “gosh, maybe there is something to this.” Wake up people, the opposition to Climate Change is funded by big energy companies (like Koch Industries and Duke Energy) and politicians who can barely spell climate change let alone survey the evidence to come up with a reasoned position. (Even if they did, they’re “agin it” as they have been paid to be so.)

If you volunteer some of your time to try to make the world better, try volunteering your time to oppose these plutocratic efforts to rob us and our children of a better future.